The Schlemmer Frame Collection Cataloguing Method and Identification Strategies
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Paolo Caneppele – Matteo Lepore The Schlemmer Frame Collection Cataloguing Method and Identification Strategies Description The “Schlemmer Frame Collection” is the property of Edith Schlemmer, who received it as a donation during the early 1970s from an anonymous man about sixty years of age. Mrs. Schlemmer has kindly made the collection available to the Österreichisches Filmmuseum in Vienna, for preservation, cataloguing, research and access to students and interested people. It came in 67 small envelopes – most of them self-built with semi-transparent paper. The total amount is 2254 items, the majority of which are excerpts from nitrate films; 181 items derive from sound films. Some envelopes carry imaginary descriptions or titles, like Griechen , containing ancient Roman or Greek subjects, or Wild West , referring to frames extracted from western films. Others were organized by subject typology, as for instance a series of images of children, named Kinderaufnahmen . Similar to this last group was the thematic group called Farbaufnahmen , which was mainly constituted by film colored with the stencil or pochoir technique. Some of the frames were grouped with the name of a leading actor or actress. Finally, 10 envelopes carried – sometimes quite approximately – the rental title of the Austrian distribution. More than 50% of the nitrate frames were preserved in envelopes without any data, in a system that, at a first analysis, could be described as casual or chaotic. A series of sound film fragments was organized in a similar manner. Origins Considering the distribution titles mentioned by the collector, the intertitles (all in German language) and some particular types of edge marks (many are Pathé’s, marking copies limited to the distribution outside of specific European Countries), it is possible to state with a high degree 1 of certainty that the collection was constituted within the German linguistic area (Germany and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire). This assumption is supported by the frames excerpted from war newsreels, of which almost all come from the German or Austrian production. They were not, at that time, shown in hostile countries for war and embargo reasons. An extremely helpful example is Gräfin de Castro , a film produced and distributed in Germany under this original title. In Austria, instead, the film was distributed under the rental title Die Irre , which our anonymous collector used to identify certain frames. These clues contribute to locate the source of the collection within the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Concerning the period of its origin, it can be assumed from the original and identified titles that the heart of the collection came into being between 1911/12 and 1918. Some titles constitute an exception, such as L´Amour à tous les étages (France, 1904), Concours de Gourmands (France, 1905), The King of Kings (USA, Cecil B. DeMille, 1927) and Dante's Inferno (USA, Henry Otto, 1924). The sound films were obviously merged with the collection during a later period, probably by the same collector. An original typewritten letter, pertaining to the 1950s, addressed to Walt Disney and maybe never posted, is preserved within the collection. It informs us that the collection was created in 1913 by a child who gathered the frames which had been thrown away by a projectionist. He then projected them at home for himself and for his friends with a home-made magic lantern. The collector, having become an adult, writes a letter to the creator of dreams, Walt Disney, imploring him to send some scrap frames, maybe because the source he had always relied on was no longer accessible. The friends from his youth are no longer present, maybe deceased in either of the two World Wars, but his passion remains, testifying to the life of a dreamer. The story of this collection and its manner of creation and use demonstrate how futile the division between cinema and pre-cinema is. The frames cut from films were shown, passed on and experienced with a home-made magic lantern. A slide projector ante litteram , made to feed an ancient passion in movement. The instrument comes from the eighteenth century, but the images it shows are post- 1895. As the characters in Fanny and Alexander (SWE, Ingmar Bergman, 1982), Splendor (ITA, Ettore Scola, 1989) or Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (ITA, Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988) the collector is the passionate child re-using static images as nourishment for his fantasies. Original value, reflections on reordering and its ends The procedure of reordering the collection was discussed and considered at length before the first steps were taken. For a while a lingering doubt, determined by a double ethical and organizational dilemma, kept us busy. The fact that the collection was “chaotic” is tied to its original purpose, which, as clarified by the words of its maker, was surely sensational. Seen from this perspective, 2 what could appear as chaos, a total lack of order, without any historical pertinence in the eyes of an archivist, has a different value and significance. The collector, in this case, proceeded differently than the many historians who inaugurated other collections of frames by taking excerpts from irredeemably damaged films in order to save them from total loss. “Our” collector, instead, cuts in a completely different spirit: he preserves what is beautiful and what affects him. He renews his very personal memories of the past. He assembles a vast collection of little jewels for the cine- amateur or, more accurately, for a magic lantern operator. He gathers a real anthology following his imagination, constituting a group of items with predominantly spectacular, more than historical, characteristics. He “edits” his show, so to speak, selecting not as a researcher or an archivist, but as an aesthete, a metteur-en-scène of his private little shows, for relatives and friends (or just for himself). Creating a disposition for these frames, he undoubtedly follows mnemonic and imaginative ways, dictated by the impulse of a moment. There is not the will to create an archival order, only the spectacular need for a montage of attractions which is modified again and again, according to the momentary feelings and sensations of our collector. Maybe he remembered the provenance of each frame and was able reconstruct its story, perhaps enriching it with his own imagination or fantasy, to renew the emotional and affective link with each flower of his treasure. He acted like the head of an itinerant commedia dell’arte theater company, which had at its disposition a large number of characters and plots, which, depending on the circumstances, could be reedited in a modular fashion. Like the protagonist of La Valigia dei Sogni , he was a historian ante litteram. Lacking archival knowledge, he was the archive itself; he was the “plot of the movies” which, condensed in single frames, would be constantly reconstructed and enriched by his own memory and imagination: Remembrance, thus, is vested in the imaging faculty; and memory deals with images. 1 He did not intend to construct a history of cinema with these frames, or to save fragments, but to create one story, or multiple stories. It is in this sense that we believe the Schlemmer Collection should be interpreted and attended to, considering its sensational, aesthetic and emotional attributes, and not only its historical or archival value. 2 According to this evidence, all reordering operations, dictated by non-spectacular functions, should be considered extraneous to the essence of the collection itself. In this sense, our historiographic work of reorganization, identification and reordering might be considered anti-historic, since it has produced a superstructure that is alien to the original idea of the collection. However, the original aesthetic and special function was indissolubly connected to the personality of the collector, to his memories 1 Plotino, Enneiadi , IV, 3, 29, 32 (translated by the authors). 2 This is also the position taken by Roland Fischer-Briand in his short text and visual essay which present the Schlemmer Frame Collection: Cristalliser la passion , in Autour des cinémathèques du monde, 70 ans d´archives de film , CNC, Paris, 2008, p. 138-148. 3 and his fantasy. Having lost this authorial mark which also characterized the narrative and organizational structure of the frames, the collection presents itself as chaos to the eyes of the historian. With no direct access to the only source of knowledge about the collection, we decided to document its original order, but to reorder it, after scans of all items had been made. This reordering is dictated uniquely by the need to recognize and identify the frames (probably well known to the deceased collector, but not to contemporary users). Thus, the purpose of our work is to increase the usefulness of the collection for the final recognition of all its elements. The reordering process As a first step in the process of our archival work, the frames were allocated to new photographic film archival sheets. Following the original order (or disorder) all frames were digitized. Each digital image was given a sequential number which respected the original disposition. Afterwards, by checking and confronting the digital images and the real frames, new groups of material presumably originating from the same films were obtained. A new provisional identification code was then assigned to them. The frames and the respective digitized images were newly regrouped, still maintaining the previous identification code (the original disposition) in the database. During the constitution of these new provisional groups of similar frames we did not follow one single strategy but chose different distinctive approaches. At first, the adjacent frames were grouped. They presented similar textual and meta-textual characteristics, e.g., in respect to the image content – identical scenographic and architectural elements and/or identical characters – or to the physical peculiarities of the film base – identical colorations, interline, edge marks and edge codes, similar image density, perforations and types of damage and deterioration.